1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing system, a print management apparatus, a print control method, and a storage medium. More specifically, the present invention relates to a technique capable of printing a document stored in a cloud server.
2. Description of the Related Art
It is feasible to print a document stored in a cloud via a print server. When a user accesses a web page of a cloud server computer via a web browser of a client computer though Internet, a document details screen of a target document, which the user wants to print can be displayed on the web page. If the user inputs a print instruction via the document details screen, the print instruction is redirected to the print server. The print server acquires the document and prints the document.
In this case, document data to be printed may be stored in the cloud server or may be managed by the print server. Further, document data may be stored in a storage service that provides a storage area in which any data can be stored. The user can instruct printing of the document from a web page screen of the cloud server, irrespective of a storage destination of the document.
However, it is necessary to limit the number of times of printing for a document data depending on image information. With regard to the above technique, as discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2002-149355, there is a conventional print server that can limit the number of times of printing with respect to a document managed by the print server itself. The above-described function is, for example, employed for a bill or an acknowledgement because it is desired for such a specific document to limit the number of times of printing.
The conventional print server configured to restrict the number of times of printing generally limits the number of times of printing for a document stored in the print server. If the print server receives a document, the received document is stored as a new document in the print server.
In this case, the following problem may arise if a document stored in an outside the print server, for example, a document (e.g., bill) stored in the cloud server is printed by the conventional print server. Specifically, if the conventional print server is repetitively instructed to print the same document stored in the cloud server, the print server stores and prints the document data as a new document each time. Therefore, there is a problem not to be able to limit the printing number of times cannot be limited even if printing the document many times is troublesome.